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The convergence of sports and celebrity can have a powerful influence on everyday politics, especially for groups underrepresented in mainstream American society. This article examines the relationship between race, celebrity, and social movements, specifically Colin Kaepernick’s protest of police violence and whether his activism mobilizes black Americans to political action. Using the 2017 Black Voter Project (BVP) Pilot Study, we explore African American political engagement in the 2016 election, a time devoid of President Obama as a mobilizing figure. We find African Americans who strongly approve of Kaepernick’s protest engage in politics at elevated rates, even after accounting for alternative explanations. Moreover, approval for Kaepernick also moderates other forces rooted in group identity, such as identification with the Black Lives Matter movement. In the end, Kaepernick and the protest movement he leads offers a powerful mobilizing force for African Americans.

Chemical doping of organic semiconductors is a common technique used to increase the performance numerous organic electronic and optoelectronic devices. Tetrafluoro-tetracyanoquinodimethane (F4-TCNQ) is one of the most widely known p-dopants having the properties necessary to act as a strong electron acceptor. Despite its strong electron accepting abilities, F4-TCNQ is extremely expensive, making it less than ideal for large-area applications. Here, we introduce a small molecule called Tetracyanoindane (TCI) as a potential p-dopant. Widely known for its role in the field of non-linear optics, its high polarizability arises from the addition of four cyano-groups, which are electron withdrawing groups. The four cyano-groups are also seen in the F4-TCNQ molecule and contributes to the withdrawing strength alongside the four fluorine atoms present. We hypothesize that TCI could have similar accepting strength to F4-TCNQ and could potentially replace it as a cheaper alternative. In this study, Cyclic Voltammetry (CV), UV-Visible-Near Infrared Spectroscopy (UV/Vis/NIR), Photoluminescence (PL), Current-Voltage (IV) measurements analysis was conducted to compare the accepting strength of TCI and F4-TCNQ. Then, the two molecules were added to Poly-3-hexy-thiophene (P3HT) to observe how readily they dope the organic semiconductor.

Concerns have repeatedly been expressed about the quality of physical healthcare that people with psychosis receive.

Aims

To examine whether the introduction of a financial incentive for secondary care services led to improvements in the quality of physical healthcare for people with psychosis.

Method

Longitudinal data were collected over an 8-year period on the quality of physical healthcare that people with psychosis received from 56 trusts in England before and after the introduction of the financial incentive. Control data were also collected from six health boards in Wales where a financial incentive was not introduced. We calculated the proportion of patients whose clinical records indicated that they had been screened for seven key aspects of physical health and whether they were offered interventions for problems identified during screening.

Results

Data from 17 947 people collected prior to (2011 and 2013) and following (2017) the introduction of the financial incentive in 2014 showed that the proportion of patients who received high-quality physical healthcare in England rose from 12.85% to 31.65% (difference 18.80, 95% CI 17.37–20.21). The proportion of patients who received high-quality physical healthcare in Wales during this period rose from 8.40% to 13.96% (difference 5.56, 95% CI 1.33–10.10).

Conclusions

The results of this study suggest that financial incentives for secondary care mental health services are associated with marked improvements in the quality of care that patients receive. Further research is needed to examine their impact on aspects of care that are not incentivised.

Declaration of interest

D.S. is an expert advisor to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) centre for guidelines and a member of the current NICE guideline development group for rehabilitation in adults with complex psychosis and related severe mental health conditions; a board member of the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (NCCMH); views are personal and not those of NICE or NCCMH. G.S. was the National Clinical Director for Mental Health at NHS England and played a lead role in setting up the physical health CQUIN (Commissioning for Quality and Innovation framework) for people with psychosis. M.J.C. is Director of the College Centre for Quality Improvement which was commissioned by NHS England to collect data for the CQUIN and commissioned by HQIP to conduct the National Clinical Audit of Psychosis. S.J.C. is Clinical Lead for the National Clinical Audit of Psychosis. E.C., K.Z. and A.Q. are employed by the Royal College of Psychiatrists which was commissioned by NHS England to collect data for the CQUIN and commissioned by HQIP to conduct the National Clinical Audit of Psychosis.

The photophysical properties of lead halide perovskite nanocrystals (NCs) are critical to their potential application in light emitting devices and other optoelectronics, and are typically characterized using optical spectroscopies. Measurements of nuclei and nascent NC photophysics during synthesis provide insight into how the reaction can be changed to control the properties of the resulting NCs. However, these measurements are typically only performed ex situ after growth is halted by centrifuging the reaction mixture for several minutes. Here, a method is reported to rapidly sample the reaction mixture during a solvation-limited synthesis to enable multiple spectroscopic measurements during nucleation and NC growth. Absorbance and fluorescence measurements of a reaction mixture during the formation of methylammonium lead triiodide perovskite NCs are reported. The changing positions of spectral features as a function of reaction time show the expected weakening of exciton confinement during NC growth. The evolving fluorescence spectra demonstrate that the capping and surface passivation of nascent NCs changes during the reaction. The species in the reaction mixture, particularly during the early stages of the synthesis, are shown to be unstable. This indicates that, even for a relatively slow solvation-limited reaction, the photophysics of the reaction mixture can only be accurately captured if spectroscopic measurements are completed within seconds of sampling. The common use of centrifugation to quench NC syntheses prior to spectroscopic measurement biases the NC population towards more stable, well-capped NCs and does not accurately report on the full NC population in a reaction mixture.

Despite an increasing awareness of the importance of spirituality in mental health contexts, a ‘religiosity gap’ exists in the difference in the value placed on spirituality and religion by professionals compared with service users. This may be due to a lack of understanding about the complex ways people connect with spirituality within contemporary society and mental health contexts, and can result in people's spiritual needs being neglected, dismissed or pathologised within clinical practice. The aim of this qualitative systematic review is to characterise the experiences of spirituality among adults with mental health difficulties in published qualitative research.

Methods

An electronic search of seven databases was conducted along with forward and backward citation searching, expert consultation and hand-searching of journals. Thirty-eight studies were included from 4944 reviewed papers. The review protocol was pre-registered (PROSPERO:CRD42017080566).

This qualitative systematic review provides evidence of the significant role spirituality plays in the lives of many people who experience mental health difficulties. It indicates the importance of mental health professionals being aware of and prepared to support the spiritual dimension of people using services. The production of a theory-based framework can inform efforts by health providers to understand and address people's spiritual needs as part of an integrated holistic approach towards care.

We conducted a secondary analysis of data from the National Audit of Psychosis to identify factors associated with use of community treatment orders (CTOs) and assess the quality of care that people on CTOs receive.

Results

Between 1.1 and 20.2% of patients in each trust were being treated on a CTO. Male gender, younger age, greater use of in-patient services, coexisting substance misuse and problems with cognition predicted use of CTOs. Patients on CTOs were more likely to be screened for physical health, have a current care plan, be given contact details for crisis support, and be offered cognitive–behavioural therapy.

Clinical implications

CTOs appear to be used as a framework for delivering higher-quality care to people with more complex needs. High levels of variation in the use of CTOs indicate a need for better evidence about the effects of this approach to patient care.

This article analyses the evolving relationship between mainstream oral history and business oral history, and explores the ways in which the latter has been deployed and discussed in business history journals. Business historians have, until relatively recently, tended to utilize oral history as a means to fill gaps in the archive. Interviews thus made important contributions to business history studies, but much of their potential remained untapped. Recent critical engagement with issues of methodology and interpretation has seen a discernible shift in the ways that oral history is being understood by business historians. This article outlines this evolution and the possibilities that it raises for both business and oral history.

This article reflects on the contribution that oral history can make to business historians by examining the Australian advertising professionals’ experiences of working in Southeast Asia from the 1960s to the 1980s. Interviews with these advertising professionals examined the processes by which they entered the region as well as their experiences of working there. In addition to documenting information and insights that are altogether absent from official records, the interviews offer an opportunity to reflect on broader social, cultural, and economic contexts and the degree to which they impacted on interviewees’ actions. By illustrating the transmission of business cultures through advertising agency networks as well as their impact on global business, this article also demonstrates oral history’s capacity to connect personal experience with business history.

Emergency physicians play an important role in providing care at the end-of-life as well as identifying patients who may benefit from a palliative approach. Several studies have shown that emergency medicine (EM) residents desire further training in palliative care. We performed a national cross-sectional survey of EM program directors. Our primary objective was to describe the number of Canadian postgraduate EM training programs with palliative and end-of-life care curricula.

Methods

A 15-question survey in English and French was sent by email to all program directors of both the Canadian College of Family Physicians emergency medicine (CCFP(EM)) and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada emergency medicine (RCPSC-EM) postgraduate training programs countrywide using FluidSurveys™ with a modified Dillman approach.

Results

We received a total of 26 responses from the 36 (response rate = 72.2%) EM postgraduate programs in Canada. Ten out of 26 (38.5%) programs had a structured educational program pertaining to palliative and end-of-life care. Lectures or seminars were the exclusive choice to teach content. Clinical palliative medicine rotations were mandatory in one out of 26 (3.8%) programs. The top two barriers to implementation of palliative and end-of-life care curricula were lack of time (84.6%) and curriculum development concerns (80.8%).

Conclusions

Palliative and end-of-life care training within EM has been identified as an area of need. This cross-sectional survey demonstrates that a minority of Canadian EM programs have palliative and end-of-life care curricula. It will be important for all EM training programs, RCPSC-EM and CCFP(EM), in Canada, to develop an agreed upon set of competencies and to structure their curricula around them.

A cache of charred, domesticated chenopod (Chenopodium berlandieri subsp. jonesianum) seeds is reported from the Early Woodland (930–915 cal BC) Tutela Heights site (AgHb-446) in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. This is the northernmost report of the crop, approximately 800 km northeast of Kentucky where the previous northernmost occurrences contemporary with Tutela Heights are reported. The Tutela Heights chenopod dates to about 1,500 years before the earliest maize is reported in Ontario and is the earliest Eastern Agricultural Complex crop in Canada. The chenopod may represent a crop that was not grown locally. In this scenario, the crop was strictly an exchange item that was circulating in an interregional exchange system that extended south to the US Midwest region and east to the Maritime provinces. Another possibility, although less likely given our current understanding of Early Woodland plant use in Ontario, is that chenopod was introduced to Southern Ontario in this exchange network and subsequently became a crop in a low-level food producing economy during the Ontario Early Woodland. However, no ecological indicators of cultivation have been found at Tutela Heights, and continuity of domesticated chenopod utilization from the Early Woodland period in the province has not yet been documented.

In the conduct of clinical trials for pharmaceutical research, access to investigational medicines following clinical trials is often necessary for the continued health and well-being of the trial participants; it is an ethical obligation under some circumstances, as outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki 2013 Article 34. This obligation becomes particularly important in lower-income countries, where access to medical care may be limited. Although there is agreement among global research and bioethics communities that continued access should be provided with prospectively defined parameters and procedures, the process is complex, as many responsible parties and complicated logistics are involved. Roche Pharmaceuticals developed and publicly posted the company’s policy regarding continued access to investigational medicines in 2013. This article provides insights on the policy, including the parameters that determine when continued access is and is not considered to be appropriate, along with an example from an active clinical development program. It also describes how multiple stakeholders, including those in academia, industry, government, and patient advocacy, have worked together to assess approaches to continued access. Continued access plans should be transparent and agreed to by research participants, investigators, and governments prior to the study and reassessed based on clinical trial evidence of safety and efficacy and availability of adequate treatments, along with relevant international laws and customs. Conducting responsible continued access programs requires close partnerships with investigators, health authorities, and third-party research partners.

Summary

It were no slight attainment could we merely fulfil what the nature of man implies.

Epictetus

Eris sicut dii.

We shall be like gods.

Ex machina libertas.

Transhumanist mottoes

Many current projects and visions about the future of humanity and the human being, allegedly well-grounded on the current moving frontiers of scientific and technological advance, envisage not only the substantial amelioration but also the transformation or surpassing of the present condition of the human species. This process would be accomplished through the ‘enhancement’ (a key term of this discourse) of its genome, in conjunction with developments in computation, Artificial Intelligence and the technologies of information and communication (ICTs), regarded as paramount, and often as the vehicles for the next and final stage in the post-biological self-transcendence of the human being, indeed, as they say with respect to the singularity in question, beyond which, as the name suggests, nothing can be known, even in principle. On the way, in the next few decades, we would acquire:

• a ‘new body’, version 2.0, to be followed, presumably, by versions 2.0 plus, 3.0 and so on (Kurzweil 2003);

• a ‘new brain’ (‘the merger of biology and technology’); a ‘new mind’ (‘the merger of psychology and technology’);

• a wealth of ‘smart genes’ or super-alleles;

• ‘super-senses’ aka bionic senses (Geary 2002);

• superlative cognitive competences;

and secure ‘radical life extension’ but with unimpaired quality of life (Wade 2009). In other words, we would acquire the next best thing to biological immortality before attaining genuine, post-biological immortality as virtual beings, a kind of eternal life without life, in the organic sense of the term ‘life’, or indeed of the ‘spiritual’ (Broderick 1999; Kurzweil 1999; Tipler 1994).

Summary

Sorry: your soul has just died.

Car bumper sticker

News from the rat race: the rats have won!

Tom Wolfe

The recent trend, by both Labour and Conservative governments, to substantially increase university tuition fees in the UK does not spring solely from the need to address the financial crisis in higher education. It is driven also by the sense that British universities, or at least some of them, must move towards a US exemplar/ myth/ utopia of the ‘world-class research university’, or some version of it, though no clear specification of the goal-state or even of a spectrum of scenarios, appears to have been published as yet. I am not sure whether many, or indeed any, of the distinguished academic backers and co-instigators of this drive share the brutal judgment expressed recently by a former Labour minister of education, resident in recent years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Britain does not currently possess a single ‘world-class’ university or multiversity, Britain having presumably slipped down into this outer darkness at some oddly undisclosed point in the recent, or perhaps not-so-recent, past. In fact, a ranking of 500 world universities and 100 European universities, prepared by a team at the Shiao Jong University of Shanghai, shows that Britain, as of 2003, was doing very well indeed in the number of universities in fairly high places on the list, in having two universities in the top ten (so part of the la crème de la crème), and four in the top twenty.

My concern here is not with the question of the comprehensiveness and equity of access to universities supposedly ensured by the new financial arrangements, important as it is, or with the ‘output’ so unengagingly described by the Financial Times in commending these proposals editorially, as nothing more than improved ‘intellectual skills of the workforce’ (2004). For which purpose, surely, you do not really need universities at all, let alone ‘elite universities’, as the FT calls them, and it is worth noting that this proverbial ‘mouthpiece of capitalism’ eschews any additional reference to such desiderata, if not sheer requisites, of a healthy democracy as a well-educated citizenry.

Summary

Introduction

Our geological epoch since the 1750s, with the large-scale increase in the use of fossil fuels and thus CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, has been called the Anthropocene by some scientists, including the Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, Paul Crutzen. It could also be called the Technocene, inasmuch as the reasons for that denomination, which are because of the impact on the atmosphere of carbon dioxide emissions since the mideighteenth century, have more to do proximately with technological agency than with the psychophysiological make-up of Homo sapiens sapiens. Besides, while it is not clear whether Homo sapiens will survive, there is far more confidence in some circles that technology, in post-human vehicles, will outlive us. Thus, the Anthropocene (in the sense defined) may well represent simply a subset of the Technocene, overlapping for perhaps three centuries or so.

What does it mean to talk about technological agency? Our starting point is the idea that during the past three to four decades, the life trajectories of our species have been transformed by the concurrent, and often interdependent, mutually supportive technification and marketization of crucial phases of our life trajectories, and of most of the key dimensions of what it is to be human. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these interactions between technologies and markets and, in doing so, characterize the Technocene. The chapter has two substantial parts. The first describes the great transconfigurations underway as regards the physical body. The second is an examination of the changes in the social institutions that educate, employ, control, regulate and order our lives.

The Body

Birth

We will be born, with ever-increasing frequency, in a hospital or clinic run as a firm (if not in an ambulance of a private enterprise). The medicalization and hospitalization of childbirth has been pretty-well achieved completely, despite fluctuations according to movements of opinion over the last decades, and even longer. Even before birth, we will owe a lot to firms that may deal with our conception in the cases of in vitro fertilization (IVF) – in general under medical control – of uterine insemination and of gestation.